5/5/13

Dharma Talk, April 8, 2013: Mind of Chinese Ch'an, Case 13

Good evening to everyone here and hello to everyone
listening by way of the Internet or reading a transcript. Tonight is April 8,
2013 and we’re going to talk tonight about Buddha-nature. We’re going to kind
of ease into it for a little bit before I throw you into the deep end.

We start off with case 13 from The Mind of Chinese Ch’an by Yi Wu. This is part of Ma Tsu’s Four
Sayings:

A monk
asked, “Why do you say that just this mind is Buddha?” Ma Tsu answered, “This
is just to stop the baby’s crying.” The monk asked, “What do you do after he
stops crying?” Ma Tsu answered, “Then I will say there is neither mind nor
Buddha.” The monk asked, “What do you say to the man who is not one of these
two kinds of people?” Ma Tsu answered, “I will tell him this is not a thing.”
The monk asked, “What will you do if you unexpectedly meet a man of insight?”
Ma Tsu answered, “I will teach him to embody the Great Way.

Does anybody have a general idea of what Ma Tsu was
talking about here? In the first part, he asks “Why do you say just this mind
is Buddha?” Who is he saying this to? What
type of student?

Student: The crying child.

Gilbert: And what kind of student would that be?

Student: A student that’s suffering.

Another Student: I took it to mean that it was
referring to an infant, a crying baby. And the first question, and the answer,
were to stop the child from crying.

Gilbert: What is the first thing you would teach
people who wanted to learn about Buddhism? What is the first concept that you’d
teach them?

Student: The Four Noble Truths.

Gilbert: You would want them to stop crying so you
would teach them the Four Noble Truths. So when we say the baby that’s crying,
that means somebody who’s just coming to the practice. It’s someone who is in
the infancy of the practice.

Ok, then the monk asked, “’What do you do after he
stops crying?’ ‘Then I will say to him that there is neither mind nor Buddha.’”
At this point, when he's saying it's neither mind nor Buddha, he's beginning to
teach them what’s said in the Heart Sutra.
What did the Heart Sutra say about
this?

Student: There’s no path.

So at this point, now, the person is being
cultivated and they’re being advised to look at the noble truths a little
differently. It’s neither mind nor Buddha. These things aren’t really there.
Then he asked, “What do you say to the man who is not one of these two kinds of
people?” Now, he’s asking about a person that’s not attaching to this or to
that. Ma Tsu says, “I will tell him that this is not a thing.” What is the
‘this’ that he’s referring to here? What is the student’s error at that point?

Student: Thinking that it’s a thing that can be
grasped mentally.

Gilbert: Ok, that it can be grasped.

So,
there’s a progression here in the studies, and he’s telling him that it’s
beyond conceptualization. This is very, very important because this is Chan. It
goes to the very essence of Buddhist teaching, and here it just comes from the
Chan point of view. Sometimes people think that Chan isn’t very deep, but the
beauty of Chan is that it pares down many different types of concepts, drops
them completely, and allows you to look directly into mind, but there’s still a progression. It’s
not something that one does immediately, even in Huineng’s school of sudden
enlightenment. Even in his school, one still has to work on it.

Then he said, “What do you do if you unexpectedly
meet a man of insight?” What would you say insight means?

Student: I would say when one has the ability to
observe what’s going on in the mind and the body.

Gilbert: Close. Anybody else? I’m going to throw a
little bit of a curve at you today. What would you call that insight? What is
that we really practice as Chan practitioners?

Another Student: Right view.

Gilbert: What’s another word for it?

Another Student: Emptiness.

Gilbert: Beyond emptiness. Wisdom.

We can get caught up on emptiness too. Beyond all
of that, we get to the point—and I’m going to jump way ahead, and then come
back to it later. It’s Anuttara-Samyak-Sambodhi, this perfected wisdom, which is
really the Tathagatagarbha, the Buddha-essence, and the alaya-vijnana, the eight
consciousness. It goes by many names. It’s also called:
true-nature, Buddha-nature, or Buddhadhatu. Buddhadhatu, meaning Buddha-element,
is probably better than Buddha-nature because Buddha-nature kind of implies “Oh
he has the Buddha-nature. He’s very soft.” It’s not a personality trait. It’s
beyond conception. All the major sutras and studies point to this. Whether one
is talking about Huayan or the Yogacara
School, or one is looking
at the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, these
all point to the true nature, the Tathagatagarbha. Sometimes it’s called the
Buddha-womb, but it’s not a womb in the sense that it’s growing. It’s already
perfect. It’s a womb in the sense that all appearances, all forms, come from it,
but it’s not separate from them.

This is where it becomes very difficult for us to
penetrate, but we have to understand that there’s something beyond conception.
It’s funny. We can understand there’s something beyond conception, but we
cannot conceive of it through the consciousness. It’s very, very different from
anything we’re used to because when we have this type of a look at what
Buddha-nature really is, it’s beyond our ability as human sentient beings to
conceive of or utilize. As long as we are stuck in the mire of consciousness,
and believing that we are going to perfect this consciousness, we cannot fully
utilize the Buddha-nature to its fullest potential. Nevertheless, it’s with us.
We just can’t do it.

In the study of the practice, we talk about
different kinds of eyes. We have our eyesight that we can see with, we have enhanced
eyesight when we use a telescope or a microscope to be able to see things from
a distance or close-up, and people that develop intuitive abilities develop the
ability of the third eye. This type of ability might allow them to see
something that we would call supernatural, but it’s not really supernatural.
They just simply have developed the ability, or the apparatus, to be able to
see those things because of their study, or proclivity from their past life
experiences, or maybe from their family. They’re able to enhance their senses
and feel things that others can’t.

We look at it, and we cannot conceive it. We think
how can you feel that? How can you know that? When people ask that, you could
answer, “How can you not?” When I use any kind of sense of intuitiveness and
somebody asks me “How do you do that?” that’s how I answer in order to
demystify it, and make it clear that it’s not an ability that’s limited to a
certain amount of people. This is not the case. As one practices, they will
develop these things more and more.

Imagine this beyond third eye skill. There’s the ability of the Dharma eye and the
wisdom eye, which have even greater abilities to sense things. At this point,
one is no longer limited in terms of what they are able to sense or perceive
about their general environment. Some people are capable of seeing things from
afar, or feeling things, or simultaneously understanding. I’m not trying to
make the point that these super-mundane abilities are the reason we practice.
What I’m trying do is get you to understand abilities and mind capabilities
that extend beyond the human realm.

Really, in the human realm, we see a very narrow bandwidth.
We see colors and things, but we don’t see them the same way other animals do.
For instance, dogs can hear very well—much better than humans—but they’re limited
in what they can see in terms of colors. And, we are also limited in the colors
we see and perceive the world to be in comparison to other sentient beings.
They don’t see the same colors. Other animals see more towards infrared. We
believe the world to be this color because we see it this way through our eyes,
and have conditioned ourselves to be this way.

Imagine, just imagine, if one was capable of
hearing a microbe, or hearing something from a great distance, or doing
something like understanding how the microbe works, or sensing all the things
around us that are beyond the ability of the human realm. Some people might
think that’s godlike, and yet our practice is still within the samsaric realms,
within the functioning of Karma, and rightly so. When the Buddha uses the
Buddha-eye, it’s beyond anything we can possibly conceive of.

As we sit here, now, and try to think about that,
it’s difficult for us to see. The Tibetans, in their vajrayana practice, use
methods to resonate the mind with a sublime state so that they tune to that
type of a wavelength and begin to move beyond the idea of the human realm. This
Buddha-nature, or Buddhadhatu, that we have is inherent in each of you who is
listening to this, or in the person reading Braille, everyone has that
capability. We lost it long time ago in terms of how to utilize it, but the
practice of Buddha-Dharma is to re-acquaint one with this potentiality. We
begin to think beyond the box so that we have a better feel for what we should
be seeing.

Now, you’ve heard me say many times that our
practice is anatman, no self, but it’s very interesting because to say “no
self” is for you to let go of self. If you hold onto the illusory self, it’s
very difficult to make progress in the practice. As we practice anatman, we
also understand that there’s what’s called maha-atman. Maha-atman is highest
self, true self. It isn’t your name; it’s the Buddha-nature within you. What we
do in our practice is try to attune to that. Now, all these different schools call
it many different things. In the Chan school we really pare it down, and we
call it wisdom, and that is all it is. It’s just wisdom. We make it simple.

In its simplicity,
it’s easy to become confused about what it is, or confused about what you're
practicing, or confused when you’re meditating about what you’re really doing
on that cushion. Most times when people are meditating, they’re trying to stop
the thoughts from coming in, thinking that if they can dig a hole deep enough
that the thoughts won’t seep through. So they try to create this sort of
perfect sensory deprivation chamber.

Quite to the contrary, the practice of Chan is the
opposite of that. All the senses are
utilized properly in the state of equanimity. The potentiality of the mind
that allows us to be able to sense, and feel, and contemplate is great, far
beyond anything we could possibly conceive of. This is why it’s sometimes
called the journey into the inconceivable. We cannot get there through our
conceptual understanding. We have to feel from our heart, and begin to generate
this wisdom.

As we begin
to generate this wisdom, what happens is that we begin to get realizations.
Now, these realizations can be as simple as: my mind came to a rest from
thinking for five seconds. Once you’ve had that thought, you’ve messed it up,
but then you just go back again. That’s why the call us practitioners.

Wendy, who’s sitting in here today, came to our
class for many months and said “I don’t get this. I don’t get this. Every time
I meditate, my back hurts, and it’s really a problem.” Then one day, she
decided that instead of meditating by leaning against the wall, she was going
to sit in the middle of the room, and she did. For some reason, whatever I said
to her that day triggered something, and she sat, and she sat well. She got a
little tiny realization of what this is all about.

When that happens, it changes you. All of the
sudden wisdom pours in, and whatever I was saying that didn’t make sense, some of
it begins to. Many of you in this room have experienced that. Recently, in my
discussion of Bodhicitta, Dick experienced that. All of the sudden, he realized
what this practice was all about. As you realize things, you begin to see what
a wonderful practice this is. One of the first things that happens after that is
you’ll want to share it with other people. You’ll want to attune their hearts
in this way. You really see all of the sudden that the practice can take away
suffering. It’s very, very incredible.

This is how we progress. Little by little, we begin
to get realizations, and as we get the realizations, it does generate what you
could call super-mundane powers. Again, I don’t want to talk about the powers
so much as I want you to be able to recognize them as they come up as just
another layer of the onion skin coming off to reveal a more translucent mind,
one that’s more clear and capable. Through our wisdom, we begin to settle and
counter the habitual energy that’s been generated by clinging to an illusory
self. Little by little, the mind and the world begin to make more sense to us.
This is important because all of the sudden we begin to see the world as
revolving not around us, but around dependent origination, pratītyasamutpāda,
causes and conditions never fail.

We see this everywhere, and we understand that
that’s how things work; we understand how to harmonize with people. In this
way, little by little, our vision increases. This gives us the energy to practice
more. We’ve talked about the virya, the zeal for the practice. It’s also
referred to as the right zeal or the right effort. All of this comes from wisdom. Little by
little, it removes the cataracts from our eyes. It’s a long path so one should
not think that you can easily jump from one little tiny realization to the
Buddha-eye, but the difference is that once we get to the point that we see
something like that, we’ll have faith.

One of the students in class tonight came from the
Amitabha school, from doing a lot of recitation, and there was something here
that they heard that struck home for them. It was critical, and it was important,
and it was beautiful. Their practice up to this point led them to that moment
that they were able to have a realization, and they found that this was not
inconsistent with their recitation practice.

All of you have come in this way. For all of you,
your past has prepared you in some way, and sometimes through some very strange
doors. Stan, you came in from a very strange door, and yet he’s here almost
every single week. He comes and listens, and he takes it to heart, and works it
and works it and works it. That is the practice. This is what we do. It’s
wisdom. And, little by little, the world around us becomes clearer. Things
begin to slow down a little bit, and they’re not as fast as they were before. This
does not mean that you’re inoculated against adversity. Adversity comes with
the territory of the human realm. People live, people are born, people die,
people get sick. This is natural in this realm. We know that, but how we function
here—what we do—is critical. Do we walk in ignorance or do we walk in Chan?
Earlier in the year I talked about The Lion’s Roar of Queen SrimalaSutra, and in that sutra,
there was a big key to the practice. Does anybody remember what that was? It
was kind of a weird word.

Nobody? You have to use your memory banks. This is the
place where you use your memory. Don’t use your memory to remember something
bad somebody did to you. This is the time when you should really begin to use
your memory. You have a great, powerful computer in your brain. I read today
that the mind processes things so quickly, and that there are so many different
mental processes and calculations and things going on in the mind all the time,
that to replicate a mind you would have to have a computer that was one foot
thick and covered the surface of the earth. So you have a super computer in there!
You are capable of remembering these things. You have to use your Bodhicitta,
your Bodhi heart, to remember these things so you can help others.

The word was nescience entrenchment. What was nescience
entrenchment? Does anybody remember? It’s more than just ignorance.

Student: Beginning life ignorance.

Yea, this is
an ignorance that you could say is an unconditioned ignorance. It’s not a
flowing ignorance; it’s a static ignorance. For example, if I gave all of you a
marijuana cigarette to smoke and somebody said, “Oh, I want to do that again tomorrow!”
That’s flowing ignorance. It’s conditioned on the feeling that you got and the
state of mind that made you feel euphoric. Nescience entrenchment is ignorance
that’s just there, but it’s ferreted out at the level of a Buddha. Even a
bodhisattva has this nescience entrenchment of ignorance. It enables the mind
of a sentient being to transcend to a Buddha mind, and to utilize this
incredible, incredible deep wisdom.

Student: For me it wouldn’t be transform. It’s
almost like a filter. It filters out all the gunk in a way.

Gilbert: It’s interesting because what you’re
saying is not quite right, but I thank you for processing this because that’s
what you’ve got to do. What you’re saying is that it’s a process of filtering.
It’s different than that. It’s a process of seeing how things work.

Student: It’s clarifying?

Gilbert: It clarifies. Do you want to say
something?

Another Student: It’s transcending.

Gilbert: Even the word transcending doesn’t get you
there because there’s nothing to transcend. When we talk about the idea of
transcendent wisdom, it’s like what they say in the Heart Sutra“gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha,” which
translates to “go, go, go to the other shore Bodhisattva,” but really there’s
no other shore to go to. It is already within you. That’s the Buddha-dhatu that
you already have within you.

We don’t see it, and it’s not a matter of filtering. It’s
just simply a matter of clarifying, clarifying, clarifying, clarifying, until
one sees that even what appears to be obstructions, what appears to be
vexations, what appears to be anything of a passion, is illusory; they’re
impermanent. There’s an emptiness, but
it’s different from the emptiness we’re used to. The śūnyatā
emptiness is something we can easily get caught up in, and it can create a
negative viewpoint of Buddhism. We transcend even that idea of emptiness, and
let go of it completely, really let go of it so that there’s nothing to cling
to. When that happens, the world simply appears as it is. To a Buddha, it
appears everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, instantaneously, and constantly
testifying to the Buddha-nature. For us, we just get these glimpses where we
catch a little bit of it, and it’s very, very good.

Student: With nescience entrenchment, when I say
filter—and to me filter and clarify mean kind of the same thing—I guess to me
it’s almost like the ignorance isn’t just the wrong view, it’s like the
ignorance is a kind of build-up of sorts, and basically when we’re clarifying,
we’re getting rid of this ignorance that we have. So when you said that you see the truth—or
whatever it is—everywhere you go, once that becomes illuminated to us, it’s
kind of the same thing. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s hard for me
to put words to it.

Gilbert: Yea, you’re still working on the proper process.
This is what’s called investigating. That’s why I’m allowing you to do that because
that’s the way you have to do it. Sometimes you’ll talk yourself right into a
corner, like you’re in a maze. You’ll be going along fine, and then you’ll hit
a wall and you’ll think to yourself, “That’s not it,” and then you do it again.
You’re going through the process right now as you’re contemplating it. It’s not
the cogitation, not the words that are getting you there. It’s the
contemplation of mind itself that is happening. That’s the dynamic aspect of
Chan that’s going on.

When we walk in Chan, mind unfolds before us in a way that
brings an order to what appears to be a very chaotic, arbitrary, or random
world, but it’s not random and arbitrary. There’s something that it’s
following, and that is the Twelve Causal Links of
Dependent Origination. Ignorance builds on itself and keeps itself in
motion. When we understand that, and we’re at one with it, then the world is
decipherable. We see the things that are there. Sometimes it’s not very pretty
for us because we have to take responsibility for what’s happening in our lives.
It wasn’t him that caused that to
happen, or you that caused that to
happen. It was me. I take that
responsibility.

We begin from that viewpoint of understanding illusory
self. As Shifu said, “If you understand [illusory] self, then you can eradicate
it.” We eradicate it not by trying to expel it from mind, but by uncovering it
in mind. We learn to see it as a transient thought, rather than as our
self-nature. This is why they say, “Turn the mind’s eye inward.” To turn the
mind’s eye inward is to stop working on the idea of subject and object and
begin to see and contemplate things as they are happening without the sense of
self. This is where the practice of Chan becomes incredibly powerful.

Let me read a little bit. I was going to continue on with The Mind of Chinese Ch’an, but I’m going
to switch gears here for a little bit. I’m going to give some definitions of
Buddha-nature. The etymology of the word from Sanskrit is Buddhadhatu, which
means Buddha-element or Buddha-principle. Another word for it, as I mentioned,
is Tathagatagarbha. That word is very interesting because the first part
“tathagata” means what?

Student: Thus comes.

Thus comes, but it’s very interesting because it
translates to ‘thus comes,’ but also ‘he who was there’ or ‘he who has
arrived.’ It’s kind of a play on words because it means ‘thus comes one,’ but
it also means ‘thus go.’ So, is it going or coming? Or coming and going? Or none of those and just is?
It’s an interesting word and concept because of this. It also means “he who is there” or “he who
has arrived” “he who has gone”.

We look at it from this idea of the primordial Buddha,
which is a Buddha that is just there, and not something that was created. It’s
always been there. There’s a term bhavanga that basically means
the background
consciousness before it’s perfumed by anything. It’s the home of the
true self-nature, but once it gets to the consciousness with a perfume, all of a
sudden we begin to see things from subject and object and with the idea of the
illusory self; we no longer have this kind of primordial Buddha approach to the
world. The Buddha, however, can navigate through here without any kind of
thoughts of self, and without any kind of thought that there’s somebody that’s
giving anything.

Today you really need to feel from your heart, and think
outside the box. The words that I say aren’t going to get you there. You’ve got
to see from where the search is. So, let’s talk a little bit more about the
concept of the development of the Buddha-nature. This part reads, “The idea of
the Buddha-nature originated in India
and further develops in China.
Due to the different culture Buddhism had to adapt to, it was a result of
interplay between various strands of Buddhist thought on the nature of human
consciousness and means of awakening.”

As it went along, and as Chan evolved, it did so not just
simply from itself like, “Voila! Buddhism came here, and here comes Chan!” Chan
was an evolution of thought that came from looking into mind. It was influenced
in some ways by Daoism and Confucianism, but without being diverted from its
course, which is good. It had some vestiges of the Hindu religion as it came in,
being influenced by the Indo-Aryan Valley in Northern India, and those concepts came
into to China,
and the Chinese put their twist on it.

What they ultimately did with the practice is really pare
it down. Instead of it being very complex, they made it very simple. That does
not mean that it doesn’t have the complexity of the Abhidharma, Yogacara, Huayen,
or Tientai schools. All of those things are in it, and all of those things are
worth studying, but its simplicity is what makes Chan so useful in practice.

However, when we practice, if we just simply sit there on
our cushion, it’s not going to work. When I went to Ohio recently I told the people that, “You
have greater chance of sitting on a cushion and laying an egg than becoming
enlightened when the approach is wrong.” When we have right view, when we
utilize wisdom in the practice, then we’re better able to know what we’re
investigating and where to do it. When we meditate, we don’t waste time trying
to stop thoughts, chase away vexations, be disturbed by things that arise in
mind, or fall asleep. We have a purpose, a faith, and a mission when we sit. We’re
good to go, all systems are green, we’re ready to do it, we know what we’re
doing, we’re practitioners. We’re not sitting there to watch movies. Shifu used
to say, “Some people they sit and watch a double-feature.” You should not be
that way. You should practice in the proper way so that you’re clear in what
you’re doing.

So this is the beginning and kind of a taste of what this
is all about. This next week kind of ponder all of this, and think a little bit
outside the box in terms of what you think mind is. There’s not a day that goes
by that I don’t wonder about what mind is several times. That question is always
there. What is mind? Look into it. It’s what gets me to read. I want to know
more. The sad thing about this to me is that the more I read, the more I feel
like I’m such a beginner. I’m really such a beginner in all of this, and I
don’t know that I’ll ever feel like I’m beyond a beginner. There’s just so much
that enfolds daily in the practice if you’re willing to invest the time. I
really strongly advise you to do that, and invite you to investigate Chan. We’ll continue next week.

Gilbert: Any questions?

Student: Does the Buddha-mind have any relevance to the
Heart-mind from Taoism?

To a certain extent there’s a connection when we say we
use heart-mind. It’s a little bit different in Taoism because there’s still
sort of this sense of self there, while in Buddhism we move away from this kind
of idea towards anatman, no self. There is the sense of self-nature in
Buddhism, but it’s devoid of any separate identity. In Chinese, they talk about
two different kinds of mind, and one of them is this heart-mind, which is
essentially where one feels from. You could say it’s a more direct connection.
In a way, this is where some of these Chinese influences came into to Chan, but
they didn’t change it to the extent that it was converted over into holding
onto the self or the idea of emptiness so much that it let go of the wonderment
of the Buddha-mind itself. There are those kind of touches to it, but it
doesn’t change it. Good question.